The villagers of the Palestinian vilage of Bil'in have been struggling now for 10 years against the construction of the separation barrier and consequent expropriation of their lands. This struggle has been a non-violent one, carried out together with Jewish activists from Israel and international activists and has inspired dozens of other similar struggles in villages throughout the West Bank. Here, Israeli anarchist Ilan Shalif explains the significance of Bil'in and recounts his experiences there.

The struggle in Bil'in is only one part of the fabric of struggle of more than 120 years between the indigenous people of Palestine and the Zionist settler colonialist and transfer project. The struggle in Bil'in is also the culmination of the joint popular struggle of Palestinians and young Jewish community members who "betray" their local Jewish community, which is harnessed to the Zionist project of settlement building and transfer. As partners second in importance only to the local activists, between us we have forged an unusual alliance, one that has hardly ever been seen during the half millennium of struggle between European colonialism and the other inhabitants of the world.

This text is a response to the article Rojava: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Perspective by K. B., recently published on the Ideas and Action website of the North America-based Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA). In the article, there is an attack on the Rojava revolution in the Middle East, an event in which the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has played a key role.

This response is not published in bad faith or with ill intentions towards the writer or their organisation but, rather, in order to clarify and share our thinking regards the question of anarchist support both for national liberation movements and what is, for us, a very important and inspiring struggle playing out in the Middle East. The aim is to have a frank, and comradely, debate that takes us all forward.

The mainstream news is filled with stories about the horrors committed by the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, and how the US ruling class and their state want to stop this for humanitarian reasons. But what has not been widely covered in the corporate media is why the IS came to exist; the real reasons for the US state’s new round of intervention in the Middle East; and how the US wants to isolate and likely destroy the only two forces that have been effective in fighting the IS: the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

This article highlights how the US state created the conditions in the Middle East in which a right-wing reactionary force like the Islamic State (formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) could emerge. Along with this – and central to the article – it discusses how the US state is refusing to back the only two effective forces that are fighting the Islamic State: the Kurdish Workers’ Party and the People’s Protection Units. Indeed, this article is also written to express solidarity with the People’s Protection Units that are currently fighting a key battle against the Islamic State to hold onto the city of Kobani in Syria.

What you read below is the experience of my visit, for a couple of weeks in May this year, 2014, to North East of Syria or Syrian Kurdistan (West of Kurdistan) with a close friend of mine. Throughout the visit we had the total freedom and opportunity to see and speak to whoever we wanted to. This includes women, men, youth, and the political parties.

There are over 20 parties from Kurdish to Christian, of which some are in the Democratic Self Administration (DSA) or Democratic Self Management (DSM) of the region of Al Jazera. Al Jazera is one of three regions, (cantons) of West Kurdistan. We also met the Kurdish and Christian political parties who are not in the DSA or DSM. In addition, we met the top people from the Democratic Self Administration (DSM), members of the different committees, local groups and communes as well as businesspeople, shopkeepers, workers, people in the market and people who were just walking in the street.

Operation "Protective Edge". Its Hebrew name translates as "Mighty Cliff"

The main confrontation between the Israeli ruling capitalist elite and the Palestinian working people which have continued forcefully over the last few weeks forms part of ongoing efforts by Israel to transfer them out of Palestine, or at least pressure them into voluntary transfer.

The reason for the eruption of the intense confrontation of recent weeks is the recent intensification of international pressure exerted on Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied in the 1967 war. Most of its efforts are to relieve this pressure, and to overcome the contribution of the recent agreement between the West Bank (partly) ruling elite and the Hamas ruling elite of the Gaza Strip.